XT660R Heaven

Life on the road is fab...

Thursday, 5 June 2014

Final packing with one more sleep to go!!

Well its Thursday 5th June 2014, I'm sat in the house looking at a pile of kit that needs its final packing before I head out on the train to Manchester airport to meet Geoff & get on that first plane to Reykjavit before finally arriving in Washington tomorrow evening.

The bikes are en route, we've had update emails from the shipping company telling us when they sailed & the proposed arrival date, Geoff & I have talked through the last bits of any planning we can do, sorted all of responsibilities at home, (which really means we've handed them over to family etc), so now it's time to travel... Can't bloody wait for the morning!!

So the trip starts at 7am tomorrow morning for me, a quick car journey to the train station, a 2 hour train ride to Manchester airport, then lots of coffee & queues as we go through security & finally get on the first plane.

Things that have had to be sorted was all the gear into hold & hand luggage, Geoff has gone for the minimal approach for the hand luggage & packed everything into his hold luggage...

I've taken a lightweight holdall type bag with 100 litres of packing space, threw all the gear into the panniers, strapped them together & put it all into the holdall to fly as one bag, the holdall is a really lightweight thing & it doesn't matter if I have to throw it away in the States or keep it & reuse it on the return journey... (by the way, I have no idea why all the photos are upside down in this next section, there are some interesting things happen when you load photos into this blog sometimes... hey ho the joys of technology!)

Minimal med kit

how many gloves??

Extra repair stuff

Tow rope, fuel line & mud stand

I recently watched the Austin Vince Mondo Sahara film with a Gaz & we saw a great way of towing a broken bike on there, you hook up the tow line to the footpegs of both bikes then tow like this, there are hazards such as you have to be careful when turning etc & it could be easy to for the bike being towed to ride over the tow rope &/or get it trapped in the front wheel so it needs some practise, but it's a much better system than how we currently do this with the 2nd rider holding the tow line, it tends to try to rip your arm out of its socket when the lead bike pulls away, no matter how gentle it is... so I spliced two eyes into this bit of polyprop rope to make a lightweight tow rope, I'll see how it goes on the trip and I might try to find a suitable piece of nylon tape at some point & sew in two loops to that, as an upgrade if we like how it works, we'll see...